Can COVID-19 Fill the Void of City Governance for Urban Transformation?

We cannot go back to pre-COVID days and we should use this crisis as an opportunity not only to designing new norms but to push for transformational changes for a better future. The following paragraphs provide some reflections in this area.

Stronger regional and local coordination for resilient rural and urban interdependence

One of the most prominent features of this crisis has been the dependence of cities on its hinterlands for food security and in turn the dependence of rural areas on cities for livelihoods and access to basic health and amenities. This has played out in the movement of people, intra-regional and cyclical migration from rural to urban areas. The well- established organic links between rural and urban areas, by taking a regional perspective of planning can effectively respond to the need for an integrated approach for resilient shelter and livelihoods. The current fragmentation of urban planning, and service delivery functions at multiple hierarchies of government establishments become even more complex across jurisdictional boundaries. The 74th Amendment requires the constitution of Metropolitan Planning Committees (MPC) in metropolitan areas and District Planning Committees (DPC) in every district for the purpose of preparing and consolidating comprehensive development plans based on the local level planning process. Even though a mandatory provision, these processes must be strengthened and enabled for better coordination and cooperation amongst urban local bodies. Guidelines for integrated urban and territorial planning are available here.

Empowering urban local bodies to fast-track local action

This is also the time to push for decentralized governance and strengthen local administration as sound bottom-up governance approaches have been more successful in the wake of disaster response. As the locally elected public figure, mayors represent the government and the community, are agents of accountability to the people, and responsible for convening and coordinating with the network of urban stakeholders to achieve a common vision. The crucial step towards empowering mayors is the security of long- term tenure. Municipalities in India have a wide variance in the tenure of mayors; while some have directly elected 5-year term, some states go with indirectly elected mayors with a 1-year term. It is to be considered whether the manner of electing a Mayor and term should be uniform across local bodies. There should also be certain clauses on the qualification of hiring of a mayor with more emphasis on education as similar to collectors and commissioners. Providing a leadership role to the urban local bodies will not only incentivize positive growth and investment, but it will also strengthen the ability for a cohesive and uniform response between mayors and municipal commissioners. It will also bring multiple silos with overlapping authorities like urban planning, financing and budgeting, and service delivery in one place. Urban leaders can access an informative resource on urban planning and management here.

Move from rigid sectoral approaches to spatially integrated planning at the local level

The pandemic has clearly demonstrated that spatial neighborhood maps with granular details have been effective tools not only monitoring but also responding to the crises. It is also important to adopt an integrated approach where health, social protection, shelter, livelihoods, mobility, and other areas are under one umbrella for the most efficient utilization of available human, technical and financial resources. Establishing systems and processes for emergency response that are grounded in data, mapping, and analysis of inter-linked sectors is possible in real-time with smart technologies. The Global Alliance for Urban Crisis in collaboration with UN-Habitat has developed tools for local neighborhood profiling for crisis available here.

Strengthening citizen and grassroots engagement for effective resource mobilization

Participatory planning that facilitates collective design, planning, implementation, and feedback from multiple stakeholders and interest groups enhance accountability, transparency, and information dissemination. Collaboration across levels of government, private sector, civil society, and other stakeholders is surely going to be the new norm and must be initiated so as to bridge the capacity constraints of each stakeholder group to respond to a crisis on its own. Local partnerships that leverage the strengths of each stakeholder and collectively benefits by the ability to roll-out a comprehensive response by sharing resources, capabilities, and capacities can be an effective and efficient approach. Some guidance on engaging with local governments and grassroots organizations can be accessed here.

Fiscal autonomy of the local governments must be strengthened for sustainable delivery of essential services

The administrative and fiscal authority must be reconciled with the delivery of functions expected from the mayors and elected councils. Local governments rely on a combination of user charges, taxation, and inter-governmental charges for providing city services. International best practices recommend local taxes and fees should yield stable revenue by means of sales taxes, income and payroll taxes, property taxes, and motor vehicle tax, and increased parking fees. The urban local bodies must improve the tax collection efficiency, and promote transparency, accountability, and participation and performance-based incentive structures should be designed to make ULBs financially independent. A transparent formula-based allocation from federal and provincial governments which is predictable would provide greater confidence in budget estimation for local service delivery. A guidance handbook on municipal finance for urban leaders is available here.

Citizen accountability and performance review

Citizen accountability for inclusive and equitable development to measure how services are being experienced by users and providers. It can be used to generate data and suggestions to improve feedback and accountability loops between service providers and users, as well as comparing functioning and performance satisfaction. It will help to bring together the demand side, i.e. community, and urban residents and the supply side, i.e. service providers/ municipalities/ urban local bodies to jointly analyze the performance of service delivery and urban mandates. Benchmarking helps local governments and citizens identify norms, realistic targets, and performance gaps, this also means that measuring and monitoring results has to be made more systematic, effective, and transparent (e.g., uniform disclosure laws and a robust urban indicator system). This is critical for the whole infrastructure development process, particularly better development planning and continued operations and maintenance.

Conclusions

Cities’ preparedness, response, and recovery from future pandemics and crises rest on robust governance systems. The conventional approaches to social and physical infrastructure development, basic service delivery, and housing have to be re-positioned for achieving a paradigm shift. A fundamental shift and redefining the city mandates, roles, and responsibilities of actors at Central, State, and Local levels is mandatory for new age transformations. Furthermore, existing bottlenecks and barriers that have withheld implementation of critical reforms must be removed. To this end, decentralization and fiscal federalism that brings local governments and users in proximity to urban services and development must be enabled. The trust between communities and local leadership must be strengthened through transparency and accountability seated in advocacy, data, and evidence to monitor the progress towards vision for the city. Local leadership must be encouraged to innovate and leapfrog from business-as-usual tools and technologies. This really means that role of center and state governments should be to support by creating conditions, enabling environment and necessary tools to encourage and incentivize cities to make local governments directly accountable to citizens, whereas, the role of cities should be focused on providing better services while balancing fiscal and functional imperatives.